


The Seven Temptations of Suzanne Bittle

by psocoptera



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Midlife Crisis, Multi, Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 09:45:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4701443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The empty nest sure is empty sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Seven Temptations of Suzanne Bittle

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Chicks, Please!: An OMGCP fanzine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4694924) by [bbbbbw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbbbbw/pseuds/bbbbbw). 



> Written for the [Chicks, Please!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4694924) OMGCP Fanzine organized by bbwbobo - it was an honor to be part of this nifty project.
> 
> 4, 6, and 7 were pretty much entirely inspired by sparklyslug musing about moms and possible shippings thereof - many thanks! I also stole Coach being named Eric from someone on Tumblr. ETA: and thank you to Chaos for looking it over for me! I can't believe I just realized I left you out of this note.

1) Greed

The first time Dicky is gone overnight with the hockey club, Suzie looks at the neat rows of pills in this month's little 4x7 rectangle and considers just chucking the whole thing in the trash.

"When he's a little older," she and Eric had always said to each other. "Dicky came so early," Suzie had explained to the playgroup. "Oh, was he premature?" Tammy had said, belly competing with Karen's to see who could pop out that second child first. "About five years," Suzie had said, and Tammy had raised her eyebrows. Dicky was wonderful, of course, but it had been so hard, in the tiny apartment with Eric still in school, letting her mother slip her grocery money while the men looked the other way. It had been so fragile, when she had started to say no, they were okay that month, and then it had been so impossible to imagine adding a baby, a stranger, to the little team of her-and-Dicky and their baking and chores and trips to the park.

But here she is, getting her first taste of the empty nest, and it sure is empty. She's just 36; old, to have another baby, but not _too_ old. Not _forty_. If she threw her pills away now, she could see Dicky off to college with a two-year-old on her hip, and have the whole thing to do again, the alphabet games and chubby-armed hugs and lost teeth and conversations over a dinner table with the third place empty.

She would be 55 when that one left. Suzie doesn't know if it would be easier or harder, then, but she knows how fast eighteen years can go: there is a reinvention coming, a re-centering of her life, and she doesn't see much point in trying to hand it off to her future self. It's tempting, but no. She takes her next pill.

2) Envy

"You sound a little worse for wear," Suzie says into the phone. She's supposed to be washing the floors, it's on her list for the day and everything, but she's curled up on the couch listening to Dicky, trying to decide if it's a bad sign that he'd said he'd rather not Skype this morning. "I know it's college, and there's going to be some drinking, but you're not forgetting you're half the size of some of those boys, right? You know you can't go matching a big feller drink for drink."

"Of course, Mother," he says. "I'm fine, I'm... careful."

"Did you have orange juice with your breakfast? And a fried egg? Does the dining hall have fried eggs? A fried egg is the best thing for the morning after," Suzie says.

" _Mother,_ " Dicky says, like she basically knows he's going to. Suzie knows she's not supposed to be a helicopter, everybody talks about that now, but she can remember a few mornings she wouldn't have minded someone taking care of her a little.

She thinks about that once she's off the phone, while she moves the chairs and gets out the mop, and she ends up reminiscing all the way across the kitchen floor, corner to corner. Playing "I never" with wine coolers with the girls on her freshman-year hall, whispering and giggling over where they'd let their boyfriends put it. Drinking rum-and-Cokes with the theater majors at 3 am, watching a boy dressed all in black dance to "Marian" with a lit cigarette.

Eric had never liked the other theater majors much; Suzie had been a little relieved to cut them from the wedding guest list, not sure anyway how she felt about them seeing her in dotted swiss in her parents' backyard, and then it had been awkward to see them again in the fall, rings on her finger. Lisa had knit a baby hat, practically overnight, when Suzie told them she was dropping out...

Lunch is leftover potato salad. That's probably a white-wine food, but Suzie is in the mood for a big glass of red. She drinks it a little faster than she maybe should, thinking about "I'll never", the drinking game for middle-aged adults about all the things you'll never do again. You drink if you think you won't. She hasn't smoked since she found out she was pregnant. She hasn't seen Lisa in almost twenty years. The day in May that Suzie would have graduated, she had popped Dicky into the bouncer, dug out her old eyeliner and burgundy lipstick, and played tape after tape, Sisters of Mercy, the Cure, New Order, and danced until Dicky cried to be picked up. She's not even sure where those cassettes are now. Lost in a move, maybe. She's not sure they have a working tape player. She pours herself more wine. Eric won't be back until late.

The next day she looks at how much of the bottle she had killed, by herself, and decides then and there that she's not having wine unless Eric is home to have it with her. Of all the ways she might deal with Dicky going off to Samwell, drinking alone is off the list.

3) Sloth

It's 45 minutes north to Athens Tech. Suzie has had the tab open in her browser for months. She's been volunteering at the elementary school, sitting at a table and smiling encouragingly at small people who have to fight every word to make it through reading a sentence. The high school principal's wife wants her to get involved with her garden club street beautification project.

She donates a lot of pies to a lot of bake sales. It would be so easy to tell herself that it's enough.

4) Wrath

Jack looks absolutely gigantic in her kitchen. Eric is solidly built, and he's always seemed plenty tall to Suzie, but Jack must have a couple of inches on him at least. Suzie barely comes up to his (alarmingly broad) shoulder.

She's thrilled he accepted their invitation, she's thrilled, but he looks _so grown up_ going up the stairs behind her little boy. Dicky still looks younger than half of Eric's high-schoolers, but Jack is unquestionably a man.

She goes out to the back to pick some mint to start a new pitcher of tea, and it's like Viola next door has been reading her mind: her head pops up over the fence as soon as Suzie steps off the back porch, and she whisper-shouts "Suzanne! Whoever is that _man_ visiting you!", theatrical and eager.

Viola is nosy as an aardvark but basically good-hearted. "He's a friend of Dicky's," Suzie says, coming over to the fence so they can chat. "From up at school."

"My heavens," Viola says, hamming it up, "I thought you'd gone and found yourself some company for some of those lonely game nights, mmm."

Suzie rolls her eyes and waves her off like she's supposed to, but it sits uncomfortably with her while she makes the tea. The idea that someone could look at her, and Dicky, and Jack, and not know which of them went with each other - well, maybe that's _good_ , maybe that's all for the best. Suzie isn't even supposed to know herself, after all. (Like she could have missed it.) It's certainly flattering, the idea that a young man like that could even see her as a woman and not just a middle-aged mom. Not that she would want _Dicky's_ young man to see her that way... but how does he see Dicky? It just seems like he must seem awfully young to him.

She goes up to invite the boys down for a slice of coffee cake - knocking, because she remembers being twenty in _her_ mother's house, and, well, she had been twenty when Dicky happened, when it came down to it. Not that that's a worry here. And she had been married. Not that she wants Dicky getting married any time soon. It's a little startling to think that it's legal now, that he _could_ , if he wanted to follow in her young and reckless footsteps.

Goodness, she's flustered. Jack keeps calling her Mrs. Bittle, even though she's said he can call her Suzanne. Practically no one ever does, she's Suzanne or else Mrs. Coach. What on earth would they call Dicky, if they... would he be Mr. Zimmermann too?

She gets up to clear their plates and glasses to the kitchen, and Jack stands up from the sofa and says he'll help. Her everyday china looks downright fragile in his big hands. It would be so simple, to turn to him in the kitchen and hiss that he should stay away from her boy, that he's too old and too famous and too _much_. She could scare him off, she can tell from the way he looks at Dicky like he can't quite believe he's real. She could call him poison and send him running and keep Dicky safe from all the complications he might bring him.

She won't, of course. Dicky looks back at him just as smitten, and she's been practicing since Dicky put on skates to let him take his own falls. But she thinks that as much as she already loves Jack, for making her boy so happy, she already hates him a little for how easily he could break his heart.

5) Pride

Dicky has coached them on how to deal with photographers, if they get spotted: stay calm, look away, don't answer no matter what they shout. Suzie still isn't prepared to have her arm grabbed in the restaurant bathroom by a young woman with a cellphone and a determined gleam in her eye.

"Five thousand for a family picture," she says. "Ten for just the two of them. Twenty if they're kissing."

Suzie blinks at her. "What?"

"Okay, fine," the young woman says, smiling wide and fake. "Forty for kissing, I can tell you know the score. I'm not asking for anything _intrusive_ , just the kind of thing they'd do around family, come on, you don't hang mistletoe in the South?"

"Excuse me," Suzie says icily, "I am here to use the facilities."

"Thirty for pajamas!" the woman calls, while Suzie shuts the door.

It's not worth a millisecond of thought; Suzie is furious they had tried, that anyone had thought she might sell out any guest in her home, let alone her almost son-in-law and her only child.

It is a little weird to think she has a forty-thousand-dollar photo saved to her phone, though. Dicky's lecture about encryption and pickpockets suddenly doesn't seem quite so paranoid.

She gets back to the table, and realizes that Jack has taken advantage of her absence to acquire the check. She has never once beaten him to the check, whether he was her guest in Madison or she was his guest in Rhode Island. He's got some advantages - servers usually hand it to him, of the three of them, and he has a foot of reach on her if they don't - but she wonders suddenly if she's been letting it go too easily, letting that forty-thousand-dollar photo make her think she's entitled. She can't stand the thought of being that person, the grasping mother-in-law eyeing the Zimmermann wealth. It's _nice_ that Jack does nice things for Dicky, and Dicky doesn't even know, she doesn't think, about the HELOC that paid for Samwell, or the medical bills for Eric's shoulder...

"Mother, are you okay?" Dicky asks under his breath, while Jack is pleasant to the restaurant manager. "You look a little upset."

"I'm fine," she says, determined to mean it; there's no point in getting all knotted up over this stuff, so she won't. She won't let it get to her.

6) Gluttony

She's had too much champagne.

Hard to say no, when it's Bad Bob Zimmermann refilling your glass - she'd never even thought to say no, actually. The whole night has been a blur, Dicky looking like he was about to have a heart attack from the national anthem onward, crying real tears when Marky got his goal in the second period. Everyone spilling out onto the ice, Jack still in his skates and looming over them even more than usual. He had picked her up to kiss her on the cheek, and then he'd set her down and picked up Dicky, and that was going to be in the magazines, of course, the kiss the paparazzi had been hunting for two years, next to the paired shots of Jack in the Stanley Cup and holding it. Dicky in a three-way hug with Bob and Alicia, all three of them crying, and Larissa and Dicky's unfortunately-named friend finally getting past security and glomming onto Jack from either side.

There had been champagne just off the ice, and then they'd gone en masse to a bar, and there had been more, and then Suzie thought the younger guys might have split off to another bar, for awhile, or a club or something, but the older guys and parents and wives had all gone back to Jack and Dicky's house, suddenly not excessively enormous when filled with exuberant Stanley Cup winners and their families. Suzie had found herself doing a shot with Larissa and Nez and someone who she thought might be Nez's grandmother, and then had made herself slow down, find water and some leftover pie in the fridge.

She settles onto the couch, vaguely trying to identify the music that's playing. Something Dicky likes, she thinks. Some of the younger guys are wandering around without shirts, maybe rejoining them from the club? Some of the younger guys are - goodness, really quite something, arms sculptured with muscle, grooves of spines swooping down to curve lushly out.

"Hey," one of them says, turning and catching her looking - not shirtless, but gifted in the butt department. Suzie can't remember his name, one of the third D-pair, she thinks, hadn't gotten much ice time.

He is unmistakably checking her out. "Hey," he says again, settling down onto the arm of the couch next to her, massive thigh uncomfortably close to her face. "Pretty great evening, huh?" He puts his hand over hers on her fork, and her stomach flutters.

"Oh, honeychild," Suzie blurts, "I think you need this more than I do," and shoves the plate with the rest of her piece of pie at him, fleeing in hot-faced confusion.

7) Lust

She thinks she might be having a hot flash, actually; she's had a few, she's expecting more. But, no, maybe not, maybe she's just drunk and shocked and phenomenally, guiltily flattered that a professional athlete put his hand on her hand like she was someone's pretty sister, like she wasn't invisible next to the wives and girlfriends. Suzie turns the corner to what she thinks is going to be a dark hall where she can catch her breath, except it's not empty; Alicia Zimmermann is standing there, leaning against the wall, contemplating a mostly-empty glass.

Suzie has always been intimidated by Alicia. She looks closer to thirty than sixty, despite having recently crossed the latter - Suzie knows, she looked Alicia up on wikipedia after the first time she met her, because Suzie knows people with wikipedia pages, that's her life now. Alicia had looked younger than Suzie, then, and still does. She's elegant in a way that throws all the women Suzie has ever admired in the shade, Tammy looking cheap and Lisa sloppy in comparison. Alicia has never been anything but warm to Suzie; the Zimmermanns have always had a sort of bright halo of affection around anything related to Jack's happiness.

Alicia does it now, tonight, looks up and says "Suzanne!" with pleased surprise, like she's an old, dear friend and not someone she's met twice and become inadvertently almost related to.

It's a smile that's been on magazine covers, and it's even more dazzling in person; Suzie is helplessly drawn in.

"Pretty wild night, eh?" Alicia asks.

It's just close enough to what Jack's teammate had said that instead of politely agreeing, Suzie says, tone somewhere between amazed and appalled, "I think one of the D-men just hit on me."

"Ooh," Alicia says, with none of the shock Suzie was expecting. "Thinking about it?"

"I'm married!" Suzie says, outraged, but she can't help giggling a little, over Alicia treating it like it had been a plausible thing.

"I'm married," Alicia says, "But Bob wouldn't begrudge me a little celebration." She gestures lazily with her drink, and smiles, and it takes Suzie a minute to realize she's serious.

"Wait," Suzie says, "Are you bein' serious? You - "

"Bob had his adventures on the road, I had a few at home," Alicia says, shrugging. "Never really got to do the crazy Cup night thing, though, the first three were before my time and the last one was after Jack."

"Well, here we are," Suzie says, "The way this party is goin', I guess you got another chance."

She means it as a joke; as an apology, maybe, a way to say that it might not be the way she was raised, but she's old enough to understand that someone else's marriage can work differently than hers.

Alicia, though, Alicia looks at her thoughtfully, and reaches over with the hand that isn't holding the drink to stroke the point of Suzie's chin, and when Suzie doesn't immediately jerk away, Alicia kisses her.

She tastes like champagne. Lisa, the last and only other woman Suzie ever kissed, had tasted like cigarettes and rum. Alicia's lips are soft, and her fingers on Suzie's face feel strange, small and gentle. She kisses Suzie delicately, almost grazingly at first. It's been twenty-five years since Suzie kissed anyone new. Since Lisa - Lisa had leaned in close one night, after Eric and Suzie had talked about getting Suzie a ring but before they'd gone together to pick one out. 

Alicia is by far the most rawly talented kisser Suzie has ever kissed, the only one to get it right on the first try. Lisa had been awkward, and Eric, at first, had just been the latest in a series of slobbery high school boys who needed to be told what felt nice. It's probably experience, Suzie thinks giddily - Alicia, hinting at tongue on Suzie's lower lip, is three times what Lisa's age had been. Almost four times older than Eric that first time.

"My Lord," she says, when Alicia pulls away. "I never thought I'd do _that_ again."

"Should I not have?" Alicia asks, looking apologetic, and Suzie shakes her head.

"It's not a good idea," Suzie says, "And not... not what I'm looking for, but... that was just downright lovely if I do say so." She's sure she's blushing like a fire truck.

"Well, good," Alicia says, giving her another one of those glowing smiles. "You're my - " she waves her hand. "Some kind of family, I want us to get along."

Suzie nods. "Next big party like this'll probably be a weddin'," she says, then worries that she's spoken out of turn, but Alicia just lifts her glass and grins.

"I'd toast to that."

Suzie doesn't have a glass, but she mimes clinking one against Alicia's.

"I'd like to direct you," she says suddenly.

Alicia cocks her head, curious. "Hmm?"

"I know you used to act," Suzie says, self-conscious now. "I've been real involved in our community theater, the last few years - mostly stuff for kids, but I've been trying to make sure we do at least one grown-up play every year - it's what I wanted to do, back in college. I never had much talent on the stage myself, but, I don't know, the way you hold your hands, I can see why folks would want to cast you in something."

Alicia smiles a little sadly. "Yes, the many fine roles for the older woman," she says, and Suzie rolls her eyes.

"I'm not gonna kiss you again but I will go find Bob if you need bolstering," she threatens, and Alicia grins.

"I think he broke out the cigars with Mario," she says, "And probably the thousand-dollar scotch. I could be there, but... I think for Bob, this was the last big thing, in a way? The biggest dream. But the Cup was never _my_ biggest achievement." She shrugs.

"Let's go find them," Suzie says impulsively, taking Alicia's hand. "I mean, our boys, not Bob."

Alicia lets herself be led, and just as they come around the corner, the music shifts, to opening bars Suzie would know anywhere.

"Oh my gosh," she says, "This was our wedding song, I wonder if Dicky put this on?"

"Ours too," Alicia says, and it doesn't quite count as a jinx, but Suzie sort of wants to say it anyways.

Someone has turned off the lights in the great room, and people are dancing. There's a little circle of people watching Marky try to slow dance with the Stanley Cup, a few players are swaying with their wives, and Dicky is dancing with Jack. Dicky has his head on his chest and his hands up around the back of Jack's neck; Jack's eyes are closed, hands spread out on Dicky's back, and his chin is tucked down towards the top of Dicky's head. They look exhausted, and happy, and oblivious to the rest of the world.

Clapton sings about feeling wonderful tonight, and Suzie lets herself think back to her wedding. She and Eric hadn't had a DJ, or a dance floor, hadn't planned to have a first dance at all, but Connie had put the tape in the boom box they had used for their processional, and they had shuffled around on the grass in front of the refreshments table until everyone clapped and she curtsied and Eric bowed. More than half her life ago, it had been.

She hears a little sniff, and looks over. Alicia is crying again, still holding Suzie's hand.

"Oh, honey," Suzie says. She puts her arm around Alicia, and leans her head on her shoulder. They sway a little bit themselves; maybe they're dancing, or maybe they're just unsteady, watching their boys.


End file.
